In recent years, the government has become increasingly aware of the need to support remote work, and our inability to achieve remote work at the levels necessitated by the current global situation has shined a very strong light on the current gaps in government remote work programs and infrastructure.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, government agencies would identify a core group of individuals that needed remote work capabilities for continuity of operations. This group was primarily selected due to a role that required them to be connected whenever they work from home or on the road, in the course of normal life circumstances.
Oftentimes, another deciding factor in allowing remote work for individual government employees hinges on what kind of data they access in the execution of their job. The more sensitive the data, the less likely that they would be allowed to access it remotely.
Agencies might also have determined an additional percentage of staff that they might want to be prepared for remote work should the need suddenly arise. In this case, they would have procured the equipment for an additional, say, 10% of their team to be covered. They might not have deployed or set-up all of this equipment, but would have had it available in the event it was needed.
In most cases, the combination of the two groups above would have allowed for a percentage of a particular agency’s staff to quickly be up and running remotely. The remaining staff would be placed on administrative leave and their work halted.
In all of the above cases, the amount of remote work that can be supported relies 100% on the ability to supply government-furnished devices to staff.
And therein lies the problem.
The costs associated with having enough government-furnished devices ready for the entirety of your agency staff is not usually feasible.
More specifically, in this case, where remote work needed to be ramped up very quickly, and with little involvement from the IT staff, this approach is not only impractical but completely impossible.
Thankfully, there is another option that is much quicker to ramp up, less expensive, and even more secure.
Combining Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with a secure hardware VPN can allow your staff to securely connect to your internal network from their own devices, without the need to to procure large volumes of government-furnished devices.
A VDI allows users to work remotely through a virtualized environment that lives on your central server. End user devices connect via the VDI to virtual machines that you have set up on your server, and in this manner, users can execute work as if they are on your internal network.
With VDI, no data is stored on the end user device. Instead, the user can simply see what is on the screen of the virtual machine and interact with it, but not store data from it.
VDI supports a range of end user devices, from laptops and desktops to tablets or mobile devices.
Combining this environment with a secure hardware VPN, like Archon's GoSilent Platform, protects all traffic and information flowing across the connection between the end user device and the central network.
Setting up a virtualized environment using VDI is much faster, easier and less expensive than outfitting a significant number of government-furnished physical devices for use. All you have to do is go through the following steps to get your environment ready for high-volume access:
To ensure that users are accessing their virtual machines securely, and that no data can be compromised or accessed through eavesdropping, you’ll need a hardware VPN that ensures all virtual desktop traffic is delivered over a secure, encrypted channel. A NIAP approved solution will ensure that you are covered all the way up to the most sensitive data.
Why a hardware VPN?
In this case, a hardware-based VPN solution is far more attractive than a software-based VPN because you need a device-, operating system- and software-agnostic solution that can work with employees' personal devices (ex. computers, smartphones, tablets, etc.).
You’ll never be able to control the varying devices, frequency of updates and software versions across all of your users’ personal devices, and you’ll need a solution that can provide a secure connection, regardless of the state of those devices.
Outfitting your network and users for secure access can also be accomplished much more efficiently and with a lower overall cost than setting up laptops for each user.
As an example, doing this with Archon's GoSilent involves the following steps:
The primary benefits of executing a solution like this are:
As this pandemic has taught us, we need to be better prepared for situations which would require our entire staff to work remotely. As such, there will be big and lasting changes coming that will force government agencies to have better plans in place for remote work.
Because a combined VDI and VPN solution is faster to deploy, easier to scale up and down as needed, and is actually more secure than other current methods in place to support remote work, it is perfectly poised to change the way the government approaches remote work in the future.